This Old Web Site – Videomaker Site Redesign

We have the pleasure of working with the Videomaker team on increasing their web traffic. The Videomaker site provides a wealth of resources about video editing and video production. In April of this year they began a web site redesign, and we included within that a number of SEO modifications to improve the visibility of the site to the crawlers. In this article, we will show you a few snippets of the site prior to the redesign, how it was changed during the redesign, and the results from a search engine traffic and crawler perspective. Here are the major steps that were undertaken:

1. One key area we focused on was reducing the number of clicks from the home page to key content. On the original site there was a lot of valuable content that was 4 clicks away from the home page. This was done through the implementation of site maps on the site to make all content accessible within 2 clicks. Links to the site map pages were added to the footer of the site:

2. Another major change was moving CSS code from the HTML source code of the file into a CSS include file, and Javascript function definitions into a Javascript include file. The original source included code like this:

The new source code looks like this:

3. The old site automatically redirected people from www.videomaker.com to www.videomaker.com/scripts/index.cfm. This created a major dilution of the inherent link strength (some of you may refer to this as page rank) of the site. If you look at the URL in the footer of the browser in this picture, you will see that the link points to the home page when we have our cursor over the logo:

Links from pages on the site to the home page all pointed to www.videomaker.com/scripts/index.cfm. Yet all the external in bound links pointed to www.videomaker.com. In Google’s latest page rank update, the site jumped from a PR6 to a PR7, largely because of this fix:

So we are all result oriented aren’t we? So let’s take a look at the results (note that growth percentages are all with respect to July):

You gotta love it! Overall unique visitor growth of 126.35%, and page view growth of 136.12%. And this was achieved on a site that was already pulling decent traffic.

This is just the first in a series of such articles. We plan to have other “This Old Web Site” articles in the near future. And I owe a thank you to Matt Cutts for making the suggestion during my visit to the Googleplex back in September.